"It is a recipe for the disintegration of Iraq and more bloodshed." A Shia himself, he dreads the idea of legislation being vetted by the clergy. He says it is too late for him to leave, but his sons are being educated abroad. The executioners, the last category of people on Stendhal's list, are all too clearly in over-supply in Iraq. These are the people who can order a killing and they are very active. Even during a quiet day as many as 40 bodies may turn up at Baghdad morgue, dead at the hands of US soldiers, insurgents, Iraqi army and police, bandits, kidnappers, robbers or simply neighbours who settled a dispute with a gun. At one time assassins put up notices in a Baghdad street market advertising their services at the cost of a few hundred dollars. Ordinary US soldiers can shoot any Iraqi by whom they feel threatened without fear of the consequences.

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With suicide bombers on the loose the soldiers feel threatened all the time and most Iraqis feel threatened by them. The Iraqi police general in charge of the serious crimes squad was shot through the head by an American soldier who mistook him for a suicide bomber. The distinguished head of al-Nahrain university was dangerously wounded in the stomach, probably by private security contractors, when his vehicle got too close to theirs. President Jalal Talabani's head of protocol was not with him when he visited Washington recently to see President Bush. Instead he was in a Baghdad hospital with a broken arm and leg after a US Humvee rammed his vehicle on the airport road. So many people are being killed in Iraq every day for so many reasons that the outside world has come to ignore the slaughter and Iraqis themselves are almost inured to it.

The death of a thousand people in a stampede during a religious festival in September was only a one-day-wonder abroad. It is worth looking at just three acts of violence in a small part of Baghdad to show how casual killings and kidnapping impact on the people of the city. They took place within a few days of each other in September in or close to al-Kudat, a previously prosperous district in the south-west of the city, where many doctors and lawyers once lived.The first killing was at the hands of the Americans. Early one morning, a surgeon called Basil Abbas Hassan decided to leave his house in al-Kudat for his hospital in the centre of Baghdad at 7.15am in order to beat the morning rush hour. Because so many streets are blocked by concrete walls protecting military or police outposts Baghdad traffic is always on the verge of gridlock. Dr Hassan, a specialist in heart surgery, was the kind of man who should have been one of the building blocks of the new Iraq. He drove his car out of a side street onto the airport road without noticing that an American convoy was approaching behind him.